L. Frank Baum arrived in Coronado in 1904, already the wizard of Oz. His book about Dorothy, Toto and the others had come out four years earlier, a new kind of American fairy tale. Popular in its day, the story remains so, beyond even its creator’s wildest imagination.

Witness “Oz the Great and Powerful,” a new movie that opens Friday starring James Franco and Michelle Williams. Disney reportedly has spent $200 million on a prequel that it hopes is familiar enough to tap into the Baum magic — tornado, yellow brick road — but different enough to stand on its own.

Others have walked that line to great acclaim and fortune, most prominently the “Wicked” franchise that started as a Gregory Maguire book in 1995, spawned a Tony-winning Broadway musical and led to touring productions that have spanned the globe and raked in more than $1 billion.

“At its core, the story gives us a template for how we stay connected to each other, and how we figure out who we are,” said Gita Dorothy Morena, a Lakeside psychotherapist who is Baum’s great-granddaughter and the author of “The Wisdom of Oz.”

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Whatever the new movie’s success, it is putting a spotlight again on Baum, a New York-born dreamer who dabbled in various jobs — raising chickens, running a theater company, editing a newspaper — before settling down to write in his early 40s, when he was living in Chicago.

The book that became “The Wonderful World of Oz” started with stories he had been spinning out loud for his kids and their neighborhood friends. It was a departure from other children’s literature, which was largely European and overtly moralistic. “Oz” was entertaining and outlandish, the launching of American fantasy.

It was also a best-seller, which meant the family had enough money to travel during the cold Midwestern winters. They went up and down the California coast until they found a place with a Tent City next to a whimsical hotel decorated with red roofs and fanciful turrets.

There may have been no place like home, but L. Frank Baum fell in love with Coronado. And it fell in love with him.

His paradise

Walk in the front door of the library on Orange Avenue and turn left. Hanging from the ceiling, at the entrance to the children’s section, are nine glass panels depicting Oz scenes. They went up in 2006, for the 150th anniversary of Baum’s birth.

There’s a small plaque nearby explaining the source of artist Brenda Smith’s colorful creations, but no explanation is necessary. The figures are instantly recognizable: the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Dorothy and Toto, the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys, the Emerald City.

When the panels went in, city officials said Smith “relied solely on the descriptions in Baum’s novels to bring the Oz characters to life,” but there’s one understandable deviation. In one of the panels, Dorothy is wearing ruby slippers. Baum wrote them silver.

Ruby slippers are what Judy Garland wore in the 1939 film adaptation, probably the most-watched movie of all time, a pop-culture touchstone that for many is as far as they go when they hear the word Oz.

Most people don’t know, for example, that Baum went on to write 13 more Oz books, including “Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz,” “The Road to Oz” and “The Emerald City,” all penned while he was wintering in Coronado, where he spent parts of six years.

It was his habit to write in the mornings and enjoy the scenery and the people in the afternoons. He told a newspaper reporter in 1904 that anyone who didn’t think Coronado was paradise would probably also find heaven unpleasant. The next year he wrote a gushing poem, published in a local newspaper, called “Coronado: The Queen of Fairyland.” It includes these lines:

“And every day her loveliness

“Shines pure, without a flaw;

“New charms entrance our every glance

“And fill our souls with awe!”

Baum regularly gave talks to local students — one described him as “kind, genial, gentle-voiced, as true and fine a gentleman as I have ever met or expect to” — and things that happened to him in Coronado sometimes wound up in his Oz books. The character called Wobblebug, for example, came out of a conversation he had with a child on the beach about what to call a crab.

When Baum was here, he usually stayed at the Hotel Del, which may be why some people believe that property inspired the Emerald City. (Most scholars think it was actually the buildings at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.) There are also reports that Baum designed the chandeliers in the hotel’s Crown Room, but researchers dispute that.

Embracing the legacy

In 1909, the Baums rented a two-story house on Star Park Circle, a short distance from the hotel, for six months. It’s now believed to be the only house still standing that the author lived in.

The Meade family has owned it since 1965. Jane Meade, a Coronado native, said she and her husband, Pike, bought it without knowing the Baum connection. They know it now. So do the five children they raised there, who all still live in town.

“We love the wizard, and the house is full of Oz memorabilia,” Jane Meade said. “Figurines on top of the furniture, a set of dishes, the script from the movie. We used to act out the different parts.”

They’ve had to get accustomed to strangers who think the house is a museum and knock on the door, or simply walk in. “They see me sitting there and they realize it’s not a museum,” Jane said. Tour buses sometimes idle outside. People take pictures of the “Wizard of Oz Ave” street sign hanging near the front door.

“It’s all just part of living in this wonderful old house,” she said. “You learn to embrace it.”

Morena, Baum’s great-granddaughter, has embraced her legacy, too, even though all the books are in the public domain now and the family doesn’t benefit financially. When she was 2 or 3, her mom read the Oz stories to her, and she was convinced, as someone named Dorothy, that they were about her.

The name actually came from a grandmother, who married into the family, but it wasn’t surprising Morena would assume otherwise. Her mother, Baum’s granddaughter, was named Ozma, after the supreme ruler from the books. She was going to be called Frances but it was changed at Baum’s insistence.

Morena said she grew up hearing tales about the fun-loving Baum, who died in 1919 at age 62. Now she uses lessons from his books in her practice, teaching people, for example, to cut out any illusions that someone else will rescue them.

It’s not surprising to her that his stories still resonate, spawning fan clubs, websites, a new movie. She doesn’t have to look far to understand the attraction. Her own son named his first child Oz.